BIS Needs Resources to Monitor More Chip Sales to Gulf, US-China Commissioner Says
Members of a U.S. commission on China said they approved of the Trump administration’s AI chip agreement with the United Arab Emirates last week, but they also stressed that the deal should have stringent security guardrails in place to verify that any U.S. chips aren’t being sent on to Beijing.
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“How do we do the old trust-but-verify, or distrust and verify?” Michael Kuiken, a commissioner with the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said during an event this week hosted by the Center for a New American Security. “We're going to have to resource the folks that would do the watchdog action that we would need the government to do, whether it's [the Bureau of Industry and Security] or somebody else.”
The new US-UAE AI partnership framework could deliver more chips to Abu Dhabi while ensuring the “protection of such technologies based on a set of joint commitments,” the Commerce Department said this month (see 2505150063). The White House last week said the UAE specifically committed to “align their national security regulations” with the U.S. to prevent diversion of sensitive American technology (see 2505190041).
Although some in Washington believe that the new arrangement could open up a path for China to acquire advanced U.S. chips from the UAE, Kuiken said not partnering with the UAE could also backfire on the U.S. by pushing Abu Dhabi to partner with China.
“It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't, sort of situation,” he said. “There's an assumption in the think tank community in Washington, that, ‘Oh, we can't possibly do this deal with the UAE and with the Saudis, because if we do it, they're going to give it to China.’ And then on the flip side of it is, ‘OK, but if we don't give it to them, then they're going to go to China.’ So, OK, what do we do now?”
Kuiken, former national security adviser for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he doesn’t necessarily “have the right answer.” He said he’s OK with the arrangement as long as the U.S. isn’t selling too many chips to the UAE and elsewhere at the expense of leading American AI companies that also need those chips.
“I think it's one of these things where you have to enter into the deal and you sell the chips,” Kuiken said, but the U.S. needs to also verify that they aren’t being diverted to China.
Randall Schriver, chair of U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said he agreed with Kuiken. He also suggested the U.S. should look to “bring in” other countries with advanced technology industries and with a “legacy of innovation,” specifically mentioning Japan, South Korea and the AUKUS arrangement with the U.K. and Australia.
“You basically want a hierarchy of countries that some are going to be partners that are going to be fully in the tent, and some there may be arrangements where [there’s a] little bit of watching and trust but verify,” Schriver said. He added that if the U.S. isn’t allowing its companies to sell in certain regions, “then we are ceding the field.”
The Trump administration is working on a replacement to the Biden-era AI diffusion rule that set global license requirements on exports of advanced chips (see 2505130018 and 2505140011).
Asked more generally about U.S.-China AI competition, Kuiken said he’s “not convinced that we’re ahead.” He said he thinks China is "doing better than we think they are, and I assume that their best is behind the curtain."
He also pointed to DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that announced a powerful AI model in January (see 2505020043 and 2504160039).
“You can see how well China did in a constrained environment with respect to DeepSeek,” he said. “We should assume that the constraints that our export controls put on them and the other constraints that the international community puts on them really incentivizes their engineers to innovate in terms of, how do we do more with less?”
That’s why he thinks the U.S. should “constantly be racing” and “pouring resources” into maintaining its tech edge.
“I know there's a community of folks in Washington that sort of always say, ‘Oh my goodness, we're going to set off a nuclear arms race,’” Kuiken said. “Last time I checked, there basically is one going on right now in the AI space.”